work or friends or women there, but, after they arrive, hopes start to unravel, and it's back in the car again. The characters can't settle down except when they are nowhere in particular, between one destination and the next. But they want to settle down somewhere in particular. They are not so- ciopaths or radicals-as John Leland ar- gues in 'Why Kerouac Matters: The Les- sons of ' On the Road''' (Viking; $23.95). Their crimes against the establishment consist of speeding, shoplifting, and a minor bout of car stealing (all right, a lit- tle illegal drug use, too). They fear and dislike cops, as most people without much money do; other than that, they are not especially antisocial. They are not hipsters, either, cats too cool for life in suits. There is nothing cool about Dean or Carlo Marx (the Ginsberg character, Karl converted into a Marx Brother). The characters marry and get legally divorced; they take jobs and quit them; they talk about Dostoyevsky and Hemingway and write novels and poems and hope for recognition. The narra- tor lives with his aunt, who sends him money when he needs a bus ticket home. Otherwise, he draws on his G.I. benefits. A middle-class life with a house and a wife and kids is what Sal wants, and what Dean would want, too, if he could stop getting in his own way. As Kerouac later insisted, it's a mistake to read this as an anticipation of the counterculture. The car is also a male space. The women who end up being driven in (never driving) the car are either shared by the guys (Marylou, for example, whom Dean hands off to Sal, as Cassady handed off LuAnne to Kerouac) or abandoned (as happens to the character Galatea Dunkel, and as happened to her real-life counter- part, Helen Hinlde). But the car is not an erotic space. Driving is a way for men to be together without the need to answer questions about why they want to be to- gether. (Drinking is another way for men to be together, and there is a lot of drink- ing in "On the Road." There is a lot of drinking, period.) In this sense, "On the Road" is a little like another sensational road novel of the time: Humbert and Lo- lita drive obsessively back and forth across the continent because that is the only public way for them to be together. As long as they're driving, they're not doing anything they shouldn't be doing. But maybe we should not understand 92 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER I, 2007 the sexual themes in "On the Road" too quicldy. Maybe the best thing to say about those themes is that they are murky and underrealized, not entirely within the au- thor's control. Sal has a crush on Dean, in the way that attractive but insecure men can form attachments to gregari- ous and self-confident men. Sal gets close to women vicariously by being closer to Dean than Dean's women are (until he, too, gets dumped, in Mexico City). This is perfectly consistent with the "Ocean's Eleven" genre of buddy stories: there is al- ways a dame, but the real bond is between Brad and George. They have something with each other that neither could have, or would care to have, with a woman. How much farther do we want to go, though? Kerouac was certainly infatuated with Cassady. Partly this was a genuine fascination shared by many; partly it was his belief that in Cassady he had found a perfect foil, in literature and in life, for his own moody and self-absorbed response to experience. Was he in a state of un- avowed love? The sexual world of the Beats is, to say the least, confused. There is, right near the top among Beat legends, the strange story of Kerouac and Gins- berg's Columbia friend Lucien Carr, who, in 1944, killed his gay stalker (and former scoutmaster), David Kammerer, in Riv- erside Park and got Kerouac to help con- ceal the evidence. Kerouac was arrested as a material witness, and he married his first wife, Edie Parker, in part so her fam- ily would put up bail money. (The mar- riage was annulled after two years.) Ker- ouac had a tendency to get involved with his male friends' former girlfriends; his longest and closest relationship was with his mother. He was living with her, in Florida, when he died. (She is the aunt in "On the Road"-a more respectable rel- ative for a grown man to be dependent on.) Burroughs was homosexual, but lived with and had children with his common- law wife, J ane Vollmer, whom he loved and whom he shot dead in a drunken game of William Tell, in Mexico City, in 1951. Ginsberg was attracted to straight men: his frustration with Cassady was repeated throughout his life. Peter Or- lovsky, his longtime partner, was basi- cally straight. And Cassady was a priapic pinball machine whose sexual bouncing around was plainly from desperation. No one would want to be like that. The Beats were not rebels; they were misfits. " O n the Road" does not cross over into this territory. In the scroll ver- sion, the sexual relation between Carlo and Dean is explicit, but that material was eliminated. The sexuality of the book that we have is straight, and mostly male. The book is not really about sexuality; it has a slightly different subject, which is mascu- linity. There is no good cultural model, in the period in which the story is set, for the kind of men the characters are-as there was no model for Kerouac and Ginsberg themselves. This was the reason that Ker- ouac became so embittered by the carica- tures of the Beats: they played off stock conceptions of masculine types-the hip anarchist, the leotard-chasing, jazz-fiend tea-head, the swaggering barfly, the hot- rodder, the cruising delinquent. Ker- ouac was none of these things. He was shy with women; he was devoted to his mother and his friends; he was a work- aholic (as well as an alcoholic); and he didn't like to drive. His drinking was self-medication; it was not for fun. He was not a macho anti-aesthete. He was the opposite, a poet and a failed mystic. He was what in the nineteen-fifties was referred to as a "sensitivo." This was the demon that he wrestled with. And this is the point at which the thematic preoccu- pations of "On the Road" meet the style of "On the Road"-the lyrical, gushing, exceSSIve prose. "Beautiful" is a word that some women used to describe Kerouac. Before he be- came bloated by drink, he was rugged, too-he had been recruited to play foot- ball at Columbia-and he had a husky baritone. He spoke with a Boston accent (he was from Lowell), and he was excru- ciatingly self-conscious. That was one of the sources of his perpetual discomfort, but when he was sober it added to his ap- peal: he was virile and he was shy. In 1959, he appeared on television, on "The Steve Allen Show." Steverino was a jazz buff who used to noodle around on a piano while he interviewed his guests (an